The Canadian reviews trickle in

You may have heard that Expelled opened in Canada this week…but it’s not off to a soaring start. The first reviews are coming in, and I am encouraged by the opening line of this one: “I found this film so distasteful I hestitate to dignify it with even a thumbnail review.”

Also noteworthy: the reviewer interviewed the awful Ben Stein about it.

I interviewed Ben Stein for a Newsmaker item in this week’s Maclean’s, and he did acknowledge the debt his film owes to Michael Moore. “We were greatly influenced by him,” he said. “He showed you can make a documentary on a political subject and make money.” But Stein couldn’t really elaborate on how Moore’s influence was applied. After all, he reminded me, unlike Moore he was just the host, not the filmmaker. Besides, he’s never seen more than two minutes of a MIchael Moore film. “It makes me sick just to look at him,” he said. “He’s physically revolting. He so angry. I like to look at people who have sweet, nice faces.” Stein–whose face is familiar from his roles as a teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years–immodestly included himself in that sweet, nice camp.

He did, however, concede with a sigh that Expelled is a whole lot less successful than Moore’s films, “so whatever secret he has, we haven’t learned it.”

No kidding.

Wait—Ben Stein, a guy with the face of a mackerel and the emotional range of a dead one, finds Moore physically revolting? He isn’t one of the beautiful people (and neither am I), so judging his work by how he looks…well, Stein should not go there.

Nice admission at the end, though.

(via Canadian Cynic)

There’s more at Straight.com and The Coast. It’s getting panned all over. Again.

Three dopes sitting around a table

Eric Hovind is continuing his father’s tradition of utterly inane arguments against evolution. In this case, it’s a video of Hovind and two of his bland buddies sitting around talking about…cephalopods. Oh, it is painful to witness.

They show excerpts of some perfectly lovely videos of cuttlefish swimming about, exercising their camouflage, and they talk about its specialized defenses and sophisticated behavior. In classic creationist form, they watch all this beauty and throw up their hands in surrender, and exclaim that they don’t see how this could have evolved, and ask, “How does evolution explain that?”

I would turn that question around: “How does creationism explain that?” And I’m sorry, “God did it” is not an explanation. It says nothing about the processes used to create the cuttlefish’s capabilities, and it does nothing to explain limitations — why can’t the cuttlefish fly? Why doesn’t it have three eyes? Why does it use similar genes to our own? You can’t just posit an omnipotent creator who can create anything without also having an explanation for the constraints on his creations.

At one point, they are talking about the mechanisms the animals use to camouflage themselves, and they express dumbfounded ignorance about how they do that (and babble incorrectly about some of the details — they do not see everything in shades of green). Did Eric Hovind’s two researchers ever think to look up the science? Roger Hanlon has been doing some marvelous work on cephalopod behavior and camouflage; I have no idea what Hanlon’s religious beliefs are, and it doesn’t matter, but he clearly sees these as natural phenomena generated by natural processes.

We do have explanations of cephalopod evolution. I don’t expect Hovind and cronies are at all aware of them. In fact, in this interview Hovind reveals a common and significant misconception about how evolution works. He speculates that an evolutionary explanation would be that “…one of them decided while he was sittin’ there getting munched on, hey, I need to evolve a defense mechanism to overcome this…”.

I hear this all the time. The only way they can imagine evolution working is by an act of will, that every adaptation must be a product of an individual organism doing something special and directed towards acquiring that ability. They miss the key insight Darwin had.

No, one of them getting munched on did not decide anything, and the action was done: it was being eaten. It would not reproduce. The properties of that specific individual would have a diminished influence on the next generation. It was the other cephalopods that were not being eaten who would propagate, and it would be their genes that would continue on.

The idea is right there in their very own scenario, and they lack the intelligence to grasp it. They keep talking about features of the animals that help them survive better, and they are blind to the fact that survival is the key. It’s depressing to see such hopeless ignorance in these three, each reinforcing the other, when the answers to the questions they ask are in books anyone can get.

Amphioxus and the evolution of the chordate genome

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

This is an amphioxus, a cephalochordate or lancelet. It’s been stained to increase contrast; in life, they are pale, almost transparent.

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It looks rather fish-like, or rather, much like a larval fish, with it’s repeated blocks of muscle arranged along a stream-lined form, and a notochord, or elastic rod that forms a central axis for efficient lateral motion of the tail…and it has a true tail that extends beyond the anus. Look closely at the front end, though: this is no vertebrate.

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It’s not much of a head. The notochord extends all the way to the front of the animal (in us vertebrates, it only reaches up as far as the base of the hindbrain); there’s no obvious brain, only the continuation of the spinal cord; there isn’t even a face, just an open hole fringed with tentacles. This animal collects small microorganisms in coastal waters, gulping them down and passing them back to the gill slits, which aren’t actually part of gills, but are components of a branchial net that allows water to filter through while trapping food particles. It’s a good living — they lounge about in large numbers on tropical beaches, sucking down liquids and any passing food, much like American tourists.

These animals have fascinated biologists for well over a century. They seem so primitive, with a mixture of features that are clearly similar to those of modern vertebrates, yet at the same time lacking significant elements. Could they be relics of the ancestral chordate condition? A new paper is out that discusses in detail the structure of the amphioxus genome, which reveals unifying elements that tell us much about the last common ancestor of all chordates.

[Read more…]

The romance of squid research

You have got to love cephalopod researchers. A rotting carcass, possibly of Architeuthis, is found in California — shredded by sharks, missing its eyes and most of its arms, torn by shrieking seagulls, described as bruised, battered, and chewed up — and the scientists are all “Helloooo, Nurse!”, and you can just imagine one of their hind legs doing a spastic tarantella and their eyes zooming out big as saucers. Heaven for a squid-fan has to be slimy, ripe, and wrapped in long, ropy tentacles, I think.

The further delusions of Michael Egnor

Wacky Michael Egnor is complaining that the data showing progress in treatment of some cancers should be credited to the culture of Christianity instead of science, and further claims that “The remarkable progress in the treatment of cancer in the past several decades had a lot to do with faith and prayer.”

Hmmm. Given that the data shows a change, a rise in cancer survival within the past few decades, was there some breakthrough in prayer efficacy 20 years ago? Thumbs in vs. thumbs out in the folded hands thing? Accent on the “A-” or on the “men!”? Sudden change from the old useless lazy god to a new and improved go-getter god? I suspect the correlations all show the effectiveness of entirely secular improvements in treatment, since the god-stuff hasn’t changed from it’s usual ineffectiveness at all.

Egnor makes much of the fact that churches built hospitals, and that the data came from a religiously funded organization. Christians aren’t that stupid; they can recognize a successful paradigm when they see it, and can jump on the bandwagon quite well. These hospitals founded by churches are using medicine, not faith, to do their healing. We’re sloshing about in the mud of religion, so you can’t credit the muck when something rises above the superstition to shine simply because everyone’s hands are filthy with dirt.

And this is just disgusting.

Science grew in a culture made fertile by Christian (and Jewish) faith and prayer. When science is explanted from Christian culture and is idolized — consider evolutionary psychology and eugenics — it becomes banal and even evil.

Faith and prayer do nothing. They do not make a culture fertile, as we can see by many examples all around the world of quite religious countries that are marked as much by failure as success. His two examples are insane. I disagree with much of evolutionary psychology, but can you think of any evil done by that academic exercise, in particular, anything comparable to the Albigensian Crusade, to name just one example? As for eugenics, that wasn’t good science to begin with, and it was endorsed by evangelical Christians. Their god seems to be no better at leading people into right action than no god at all.

All science is explanted from sectarian superstition, and large numbers of scientists are godless — yet rather than banality and evil, they seem to be very successful at discovering wonder and beauty. Egnor’s comments are but one step away from the same nonsense Ben Stein was peddling, that “science kills people”, and just as ill-founded and ridiculous.

Bad radio notice

Uh-oh. The president of Minnesota Atheists, August Berkshire, is descending into the den of idiocy that is our local evangelical radio station, KKMS. Listen if you can bear it. Personally, I don’t know that I can — it’s too repellent to listen to people who stress the importance of mindless faith, yet have only bad faith to offer.

If you missed it, here’s an MP3 of August’s segment.